Chapter 7 · free to read
Three days out. No station on the scanner, no beacon, no answer from anything. I checked every hour anyway.
The ship had been making that noise since we undocked. I'd been calling it thermal stress, because the other word for it was worse.
Two. Not forty. Not hundreds. After a moon-sized graveyard of my own face, the number that finally frightened me was two.
It didn't need the station. It never had. It only ever needed something on board that could grow flesh — and every ship in the black carries one of those.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.